Arkansas & Michigan: Town Secrets, 1875-1912

Season 40: America's 250th — 50 states, 50 forgotten crimes. Two communities. Two murders decades apart.

In the Arkansas Ozarks, a town rushed to convict a man on circumstantial evidence and may have hanged the

wrong person. In northern Michigan, an entire town conspired to kill its tyrannical founder — then said nothing

for sixteen years.

In 1912, eighteen-year-old Ella Barham walked to a post office in the Arkansas hills to buy cloth for a hat. She

never came home. Her dismembered remains were found scattered across a hillside that night. The community

blamed a neighbor named Odus Davidson. He was hanged within nine months. His gravestone still declares he

was innocent.

The Victims

Ella Lillian Ethel Barham was born February 16, 1894, in the Pleasant Ridge community of Boone County, Arkansas

— a scattering of homesteads along Crooked Creek in the Ozark hills. Her father, George Solomon Barham, was

one of the largest landowners in the county. Ella was eighteen, described by neighbors as popular and well-liked.